Heading Upstream - Working earlier to Prevent Youth Homelessness

Upstream Cymru is a collaborative, early intervention initiative that works through schools to get to the heart of how youth homelessness systems need to be designed. The aim is to identify young people at risk of homelessness long before they reach crisis point or are threatened by homelessness.

Upstream Cymru builds on the success of an earlier Australian initiative which achieved a 40% reduction in youth homelessness. The innovative, school-based initiative asks pupils to complete a survey developed by Cardiff University in conjunction with international partners, which allows for identification of known risk factors for homelessness at an early stage, at which point experienced, school-based Llamau staff can intervene accordingly.

As the project undertakes its first surveys, an update from Llamau’s Upstream Cymru Project Manager, Talog Harries, gives an insight into what it has taken to get to this point.

October 1st 2020

Yesterday, a high school in RCT became the first in Europe to take part in a pilot of a system, which aims to revolutionise the way that homelessness is prevented. It’s taken a long time to get here and the challenges along the way have been tougher than any of us could have foreseen, but as the first survey results came in, it felt like a marker had been lain down.  

Back in the summer of 2019, planning was underway for what has become the Upstream Cymru pilot. A truly collaborative endeavor from the beginning, the project has brought together partners from Llamau, Cardiff University, Do It Profiler, End Youth Homelessness Cymru and three forward thinking local authorities, keen to look at how we can meet the challenge of youth homelessness differently.

Survey development followed, taking inspiration from work done in similar pilots in the USA, Canada and Australia. Academic rigour was key, but we also needed our approach to work in Welsh communities, so we worked with young people who have experienced homelessness, to ensure that the questions we were asking were the right ones. Supportive local authorities worked with us to ensure that data protection was watertight, and introduced us to schools.

By January 2020 we had a survey in production, we’d recruited a team of Family Mediation and Emphasis workers and, thanks to Do It Profiler, we had a web based app that could run hundreds of surveys and process results instantaneously, meaning we could quickly identify young people who need support and start working with them.

Through February and March plans were made, schools were visited and teachers met. Finally, thanks to the partners’ tenacity, on 12th March we had conformation that the first survey would run just two weeks later. Surely nothing could stop us now…

Oh.

Well, none of us saw that coming.

From a fully trained and resourced team ready to get to work in well prepared schools across South Wales, we were now working from bedrooms and kitchens. How do we run a school-based project when all the schools are closed? The weeks that followed were a rollercoaster ride under house arrest; adaptation, reimagining and emails…so many emails.

We had to accept that we wouldn’t be able to launch the project as we’d so painstakingly planned to, but we still had skilled and energetic staff willing to offer whatever support they could. As workers, we fell back onto our mobile phones and the mass discovery of MS Teams and Zoom. We all learned to do things differently; we also learned how to balance work and home schooling, how to stay connected to a fragmented world; we learned who Joe Wicks was; some even tried to keep up with him for a while.

We worked hard to established new connections with Children’s Services and Youth Services. We talked to the new school Hubs, to anyone who may have contact with families needing support. It quickly became apparent that referrals were down across the board. This was counter intuitive; we knew families would be struggling with the additional pressure of lockdown, restriction on teenage life and the social and financial implications of the crisis. So where were they?

Our suspicion was, without the schools, youth clubs and everyday community interaction, children in need were becoming less visible, and families were unable or unwilling to refer themselves. Without the safeguarding of institutions like schools, the link to children and families was being lost. The need for a mechanism to identify those who were at risk had become all the clearer.

However, as the weeks went on, the calls from youth and social workers grew, and referrals began to come though. We were carrying cases.

It wasn’t what we’d planned back in 2019, but we were able to operate a telephone support service and support young people via WhatsApp and Zoom. In the schools too, we were making ground. Teachers were seeing the benefits in the new support available. Feedback we had from the external teams on the commitment of Upstream staff was both humbling and reinvigorating.

And then things started to change again.

On June 29th schools tentatively reopened their doors and our hard work during lockdown to reshape the service and build relationships meant that the support team was there from day one, providing face to face support where it was most needed. Working with teachers in the schools and classrooms.

Now, there are more changes afoot.

Schools are back to something approaching normality and we can get back to where we were meant to be, over 6 months ago. Yesterday saw the survey of a whole year group in one high school for the first time. The results, which show how young people feel about their housing and education situations, their own emotional wellbeing and resilience, their experiences of homelessness, need to be read in the context of the new normal, but already they are helping us to identify young people who might need help from our experienced team. We’ll be building on this over the coming weeks, surveying hundreds more young people, working with their schools to ensure that they have all the help they need and developing a greater insight into how to work upstream to prevent homelessness amongst young people in Wales.

As has been the case for so many others, the past months have been trying for this project, but I’m proud of my team who have worked so hard to deliver for young people and excited about the future of this crucial project.